A shell heap at Vignier III shows people eating from the sea in 3630 BCE

Vignier III sits near the coast of Haiti and was occupied around 3630 BCE by Casimiroid people, among the earliest populations known in the Greater Antilles. What survives of them is mostly shell. The deposit is thick with it, which is the ordinary signature of a community taking a large part of its food from the shoreline, from the shallows and the reef rather than from farmland. That is a workable diet in this archipelago and it supported people here for thousands of years. I put a shell heap on a Haitian timeline for one reason. The country is usually introduced through 1804, or through 1492 if the account reaches back that far. Occupation of this ground runs about five and a half thousand years, and the first people to live on it were feeding themselves from the same water that later carried the ships. Haiti has a prehistory, and it has a physical address.

Vignier III sits in Haiti and it carries a radiocarbon date around 3630 BCE. That is the earliest firmly dated human habitation we have on the island. I want to sit with the number for a second, because the arithmetic does something to you. From Vignier III to 1804 is about fifty four centuries. From 1804 to today is a little over two. So more than ninety six percent of the human story on this island happened before the country existed, and almost all of that ninety six percent gets compressed into a single sentence about Taínos in most school curricula. That compression is not an accident of space. It is the shape colonial history gives to a place, where the clock only starts when Europeans arrive to look at it. This entry exists to start the clock earlier.